


Another Kind of Memory

by emynii, ObliObla



Series: Nia & Obli's Whumptober 2019 [15]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Gen, Heaven, Hell, Post-Season/Series 04, Scars, Whump, Whumptober 2019, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-12-17 11:30:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21053672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emynii/pseuds/emynii, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObliObla/pseuds/ObliObla
Summary: Sometimes, he counts the scars.For the Whumptober prompt: scars





	Another Kind of Memory

**Author's Note:**

> "Scars are just another kind of memory."  
— M.L. Stedman (The Light Between Oceans)
> 
> A voice said, Look me in the stars  
And tell me truly, men of earth,  
If all the soul-and-body scars  
Were not too much to pay for birth.  
— Robert Frost
> 
> Dem Bones prompts: bones, snakes

_Sometimes, he counts the scars._

_Or tries to, because they number as the stars do, carving constellations across his skin. In this form, with his flesh debased by every injury, no wound ever heals—not truly—only retreats to this body where he marks out his sins._

_Where they’ve been marked for him._

_Here, in Hell, he stands in his chambers before a mirror and trails his fingertips down to his elbows, feeling the roughness there._

_And he remembers._

His elbows and knees were bleeding, his hair was wild and unkempt, and he stood before the throne of God, trying to hold in his laughter.

“What _ happened, _Samael?” Father asked, frowning down at him.

He glanced sideways at Michael, who was bleeding from a busted lip, badly concealing a smirk. “Nothing, Father,” he said.

“So why did you two disappear from the training grounds? Amenadiel flew over half of Creation searching for you!”

They looked at each other and burst into laughter.

_And he laughs, in this empty room, but the sound dies as it leaves his lips, and he is still again._

He looped the chain over the creature’s throat and planted his feet against the back of its neck. It roared and shook, trying to throw him. He grunted, rolling with it, and though he managed to hold on, to drag it across dimensions and bear it down to the dusty, barren ground of his Father’s newly created land, the wounds from its poisoned claws burned across his chest. He panted, pinning it against the earth, holding it as it struggled until, energy finally spent, it collapsed.

He hissed, pressing against the gashes, his fingertips coming away red and dripping. Back in the Silver City, Raphael would mend youthful scrapes and injuries. But Samael’s purpose had grown wanton and cruel, and he refused to inflict his pain on them.

He sighed and pulled out his knife, turning toward the beast. Intestines, he'd found, made for good sutures. The scars would be messy, but his stitches were getting neater all the time. Besides, everything healed in Heaven.

_Didn’t it?_

“If Uriel pulls that nonsense again…” He scuffed his sandaled heel against the perfect pavement of one of the Silver City’s less traveled footpaths, fingertips trailing along the slight scar on his bicep from his brother’s most recent prank. He knew it would disappear soon—as they all did—but it was the principle of the thing.

“He’s only trying to get a rise from you,” Michael said, frowning, leading their way through one of the pristine gardens.

“Yes, well, it’s working, isn’t it?” He sighed, glancing blankly at a flower he used to find beautiful.

“You barely talk to him anymore. You barely talk to _ anyone _ anymore. Sam—”

“It’s not my bloody fault!” He spun on his heel, pinning Michael with his gaze. “It’s not like I asked for this.”

“Didn’t you?”

He scowled and turned away.

“Didn’t you _ want _ another purpose when the stars were completed?”

“Yes, but—” He hissed in a breath. “Not _ this.” _ Not the custodian of Father’s mistakes, the keeper of his celestial prison.

“You cannot refuse your duty, Samael.”

_ Don’t call me that, _ a voice whispered in his mind. His poison. His _ venom. _

He was sick of it.

But he couldn’t talk to Michael. Not truly. Not anymore. He made to walk away but Michael stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Brother, I—”

“I have _ duties _ to fulfill.”

Michael let him go, but he didn’t return to this new purpose, but to his old one. After all, he was never alone when he had his stars.

_So far down in the dark, there are no stars._

_There are no flowers, either._

He had never wanted to be a leader. He had only wanted freedom of purpose. But he’d needed allies. Talking turned to demanding turned to fighting. And when they fought for him, they bled for him. And when they bled…

“Hold still,” he hissed, working the sutures through the skin of a sibling he didn’t even know the name of. He had wounds himself, but these _ soldiers_—formerly of God, now, he supposed, of himself—knew not how to tend to their own; it could wait.

“But it _ hurts!” _

They were weak. _ Soft. _ None of them knew true pain.

_In his chambers, he looks at the red, ravaged flesh that creeps up from his collar and down past his sleeves and chuckles bitterly._

Something like guilt echoed beneath his skin, leaving scars so deep it would take eons to uncover them. The angel cried out, and he hardened his heart to it, pressing them back to the ground, slicing into the flesh again to pull the edges of the wound together.

And later, washing the blood from his hands, wincing as his own wounds, still untended, pulled with the motion, he looked out over those fallen in battle and told himself he couldn’t feel the ache.

_He watches his reflection, but it has no answers._

_It never does._

“Kneel.”

“No,” he whispered, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.

“Kneel,” Michael called, again.

_”No.”_

_He runs his fingers over the pitted flesh of his face and wonders what would have happened if he had._

Michael struck, the flat of the blade catching his cheek, his brow, the edge cutting into the skin.

He refused to cry out, refused to fall. But there were other angels, now, looping chains around his throat, his arms, his wings, bearing him to the ground.

And Michael stood over him, every moment of amity they’d ever had stinging like the wounds slowly leaking blood, like the bruises across his skin burning out as stars do.

“Look at me.” And there was something like love in Michael’s voice, however buried in pain and rage. 

But he kept his head down.

_He doesn’t know, even now, whether pride kept it there._

_Or shame._

And the tip of the sword pressed beneath his chin, slicing across in a wound so pure an echo of it would remain etched into his more angelic flesh. And he was made to meet the eyes of his captor, of his once closest companion.

In the distance he could see his Mother and Father, but they merely turned away. And Michael, expression conflicted in a way he’d never be sure of, lunged, piercing deep.

_He presses his fingers to the hollow under his rib cage, and a cry he’d refused, once, to loose reverberates through the room._

He didn’t know how long he’d been falling when he hit the ground. He didn’t know where he was.

He didn’t know anything but the pain.

_He slips off his vestments, slowly, as if it is some sort of profane ritual, dropping them to the rough stone ground. His hands map his body, crown to toe—there is no part of him that did not burn._

When the chains finally melted from the heat that rended flesh and burrowed into his very bones, he dragged his body from the fire and the acid and the causticity and the blood and found himself on land dry and barren and featureless. Cast into a place he had rebelled to try to escape the grasp of. A place called Hell.

He scrambled, naked and unshod, over jagged rocks until he stumbled onto a plain of obsidian, the mirrored surface broken by the bones of creatures caught in the sudden lava flow. And there, in the reflective blackness, he saw the thing he had become, and he screamed.

And though it may have been a wasteland, it was not empty, for all the beasts he had bound in the pit at the behest of his Father were there with him, waiting.

And they were hungry.

_He outlines a knot of twisted flesh on his calf and remembers the beast’s teeth, cutting deep._

Unlike in Heaven, in Hell scars never faded. At least, not on the flesh he soon discovered he could hide in favor of his former glory. But though the scars horrified him, their presence was almost a comfort—only in them could he prove the extent of his punishment.

He began to understand that while he could inspire fear with the ravaged flesh that Hell—that his Father—had granted him, so too was there weakness there. And weakness was death. Only in his cruelty could he allow others to see what had been made of him.

_That he had made of himself. He understands now that this was the mark of his pain and his rage. His hatred and his shame._

But there was pride, too, in what he had suffered. In what he had survived.

And when he fought with demons and beasts, some of which he’d damned himself, some that came after, crawling from the depths where chaos dwelt, he found those wounds marked on his skin, never truly healing. Corruption tore at his flesh as it did the creatures of darkness, of Hell.

And he was one of them.

_His wings itch, and he allows them to emerge. Though he has access to either, when he is in this form they remain bat-like and leathern. Another mark of corruption, but also another mark of pride. For there is strength there, and power. Power it took eons to wrest from the night._

When he finally understood that no one was coming back for him, he began to search for an escape, for any source of light in the darkness.

And there was a garden, and there was a girl. And he hid his scars away, and pretended to be pure and unblemished as the stars he could once again see. There was beauty there, but there was also pain. And when they were cast out, as he had been cast out, he could feel the wounds crawling under his skin.

“Samael,” Amenadiel said, as he leaned against the trunk of a tree.

_ “Lucifer,” _ he hissed, and wondered why he’d bothered. Amenadiel didn’t care. None of them did.

“You _ will _return to Hell.”

He rose to his feet, holding back a snarl. “Are you going to _ make _ me?” he asked in a low voice.

Amenadiel responded with none of his familiar, brotherly exasperation. "If I must, but Sa— _ Lucifer_... Don't be a child. Come."

Lucifer snorted and turned to walk away. But Amenadiel grabbed his shoulder, pulling him back. He ducked, spinning on his heel, grabbing at Amenadiel’s robes to hit him in the face.

Amenadiel pushed him back, dodging the blow. “You _ wanted _ this!” he yelled.

“I—” But before he could speak, Amenadiel dove forward, catching Lucifer around the middle, dragging him to the ground. They scuffled, as they had when they were young, but Amenadiel no longer held back, his knuckles and elbows and knees raising welts.

But Lucifer was as slippery as the serpent he later would be called, rolling them, pinning Amenadiel beneath him, and fastening his hands around his brother’s throat. Blood rushed fast under his fingers, Amenadiel’s heartbeat frantic. For a moment they stared at each other, frozen, but the war was over, and Lucifer was _ tired. _ His hands slipped to Amenadiel’s shoulders, and he made to get up.

But Amenadiel felt the change, and hooked Lucifer’s leg, switching them and slamming him to the ground. He caught at him before he could move, and pulled Lucifer prone, face pressed into mud and grass. His arm was wrenched behind his back, and he felt the bone break with a _ snap. _

“Is that it?” Lucifer asked, laughing, but he was lost to memory, and all he could see was Michael, sword in hand, poised above him.

But Amenadiel said nothing—spat no venom, offered no comfort. Merely pulled Lucifer to his feet, brought out his wings, and flew them down to Hell. He dropped Lucifer on the floor of the throne room and left.

He had his duty, and he would perform it. That was all.

Lucifer returned, again and again, to take his pleasures where he could. And Amenadiel was there, always, to bear him to the ground and leave marks upon his skin. To drag him to Hell and cast him down all over again.

And every scar was a trophy to the obstinacy with which he had rebelled.

And when he finally couldn’t take any more, when he stopped trying to please someone who’d never cared, he kneeled on a beach as pain spiked through him, as Mazikeen severed his wings. But he didn’t cry out, only stared up at the stars, feeling the wings fall away, feeling the blood sluicing down his back.

And those scars were the best and the greatest of them.

_He kneels, now, hands clasped in something like prayer. He glances up at the darkness of the ceiling, supplicating to something he doesn’t understand, and closes his eyes._

_But he doesn’t know how to pray anymore._

_And there, on his knees, he feels the ache._

_"Chloe..." _

The bullet wound was an injury brightened by bone-deep shock, by a concern he didn’t understand. By a word that intrigued and terrified him in equal measure.

Vulnerable.

The Devil, burned by fire. But not the heat of hellfire—no, only little, mortal flames for a little, mortal life.

Vulnerable

“Seems you make me vulnerable too.”

And he died, and he lived, with a bullet in his stomach, and it was a sacrifice of self—of freedom—he couldn’t make himself regret.

_He presses his fingers to his knee, his forearm, his gut—these wounds are barely visible over eons of injury, but their aches are by far the sweetest._

_His hands are almost frantic now: brow, cheek, lips, throat. Blades, punches, impact wounds—down his chest, his ribs, his stomach. Strangers and compatriots and family._

_Burns, beating a pattern above his heart, scorch marks leading a trail to another damnation, one freely chosen for the life of another._

_His fingers trail back up his body, catch on his cheek again, press into the shadow of a bruise._

“So, _ please, _ let there be light.”

“My angel, I will miss you so much.”

_The wounds don’t ache half as much as the memories do._

He had woken in the desert, alone. And even when he returned…

He was alone.

And there, the wings held stiffly against his back, his devil face gone, he wondered if every scar he'd ever had had been wiped away. If every memory of pain and torment no longer made its mark upon his flesh. But every mark of triumph and pride was gone, too.

And his grief tasted of iron and ran red with blood, each wound replaced by a deeper cut as he sliced into his back over and over and over again.

_His fingers trail from his face to his shoulder, outlining a particularly rough spot, remembering where the knife went in. His fingertips slide across to his other shoulder in some mockery of the sign of the cross._

_He looks up, again, past the ceiling, to a world he isn’t sure he’ll ever see again._

He had screamed when the bullets hit his wings, so many points of pain they blurred together and he might have been burning all over again. Body shaking, cradling Chloe’s head, no thought left in his brain but, _ For her, for her, for her. _

And then she was gone, gone to Europe, gone from where he’d wished to keep her, in the broken hollows of his heart.

_He cannot count the bullet wounds but in the wings that arch unnaturally from his back, from those places that are thickest with scars. And so he marks them and loses himself again to memory._

_This is not something he wishes to recall, but these scar-memories are so much stronger than things that flit through the mind leaving little trace. He strokes his fingers across the back of his opposite hand, feeling the roughened skin, the threads of muscle and exposed tendons._

There was a hole in his hand.

There was a hole in his hand, but it hardly seemed to hurt at all because Chloe _ came back _ and she was _ okay. _

A piano, a look, a touch to the hand.

“What I saw was my partner.”

But she was lying. She _ was _ afraid.

_His fingernails tighten against his skin, but then he relaxes, and sighs._

A cabin, an axe, a vow.

“And I would do it again. And again. Don't you know that, Detective?”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

And everything had broken.

But then there was a garden—though made of metal and glass not fig and apple—and there was a girl. The same girl, but he was not the same Devil, though he tried. He tried. Sometimes he wished he truly had been the serpent, could shed his skin as easily as a snake and emerge renewed.

But he could pretend.

He could pretend that the wound in his shoulder didn’t matter, that the wound in his heart didn’t matter. That he wanted closure. That he could let go.

And when that lie died with another gunshot to the gut, and he went off and did something dramatic before realizing he was right where he was supposed to be, he found a new one. That he was happy. He was happy.

He was _happy._

But the truth was so much harder to face. There was something rotten inside of him—His poison, His _venom_—and it was clawing its way out of his skin, scars crawling down his arms, over his face. The corruption spread, warping his bones, twisting in his veins. His pain, his rage, his hatred, his shame—displayed for all to see.

Memory, then, was bitter on his tongue.

_Memory, now, is all he has left._

He didn’t know how to forgive himself, but he knew he had to try.

And when the people he loved were put in danger, he knew what he had to do. He finally, truly, saw his choice. And though his hand might have been forced, he would make it.

_And now it is over. This recitation, this thing almost like penance._

_There are no stars down in the dark, but he will count the lesser fires that burn in every crag and hollow of this faithless form. He will press his fingers to his wounds until they cause him pain—for pain is so much purer than numbness—and count the memories that ache in recollection. But no amount of torment will ever convince him that cold oblivion is better than looking up at stars he can no longer see._

_And they are beautiful._


End file.
